Introductory, maybe dumb, question on networking and vlans
Hello,
I am new to the homelab space and currently in the planning phase trying to understand how everything works. I've been contemplating how I would want to set up my network and saw some interesting threads about secure vs general networks and how to access between them. For wifi, this all makes perfect sense to me; however, for ethernet I am a bit confused. I have a single ethernet connection that runs through my place so I am able to directly connect via ethernet.
Let's suppose I have a simple example of a single internet fiber coming in, and I have 2 VLAN's setup, one for secure personal devices, and one for iot devices. For hypothetical sake (since still all planning), my homelab is all setup in my office where router, etc is. In my living room, I would like to have two devices hooked up to ethernet, a desktop which would live on the personal network, and some iot lights which would live on the iot network.
Is this possible to accomplish? I had briefly read about vlan truncation which appears it could do this but then would require hardware in the living room to re-split and route the connection there, is this correct, if so, what sort of hardware would this require?
If my general understanding is wrong, please feel free to correct me, still learning about all of this stuff :)
Posted Feb 25, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC